Meetings Were Broken Before the Pandemic
We just didn’t notice until everyone went home
The sudden shift to remote work has surfaced a bunch of assumptions that were hiding in plain sight. We assumed being in the same building meant being aligned. We assumed meetings were how decisions got made. We assumed that if someone was in their chair, they were productive.
None of that was true before the pandemic. We’re just noticing now because the usual coping mechanisms – hallway conversations, tapping someone on the shoulder, reading body language in a conference room – are gone.
The real cost of synchronous everything
Every meeting is a synchronous checkpoint. Multiple people have to be in the same place at the same time. The direct cost of an hour-long meeting with eight people is eight person-hours. That’s bad enough. But the indirect cost is worse.
Context switching is the thing that kills you. A developer with three meetings scattered across the day doesn’t have three free blocks between them. They have zero deep work blocks. The ramp-up time to get back into a hard problem after an interruption is real – Cal Newport’s stuff on this matches my experience exactly. Most engineers need two to three uninterrupted hours minimum to do anything meaningful. Meetings destroy those blocks.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot and I think the orgs that come out of the pandemic strongest will be the ones that go async-first. Not zero meetings, but default to async and only go synchronous when it genuinely adds something.
What that actually looks like
Write decisions down instead of announcing them in meetings. Put the proposal in a doc, let people comment on their own time, synthesize the feedback, publish the decision with reasoning. Now you’ve got a durable record that anyone can reference later. A meeting never gives you that.
Do design reviews as RFCs. Author writes a detailed proposal. Reviewers comment asynchronously. You can still have a brief meeting to resolve disagreements, but only after everyone has had time to actually read and think. The quality of feedback goes way up when people aren’t reacting in real time.
Push status updates instead of pulling them. Instead of a weekly meeting where everyone gives a verbal report that nobody remembers, put updates in Slack or a shared doc. Searchable, persistent, respectful of everyone’s time.
And when you do have meetings, for the love of god, have an agenda. Distribute pre-reads. Document outcomes afterward. The meeting should be for discussion and decisions, not for one person reading slides while everyone else checks email on their laptops.
The hard parts
This isn’t a tooling change. It’s a culture change.
You have to learn to write well. In an async-first org, your ability to communicate is limited by your ability to write clearly. Engineering orgs chronically undervalue this. I’ve started treating writing as a core competency, on par with coding and system design.
You have to trust people to manage their own time. If your instinct is to check whether someone is “online,” you’re managing for presence, not output. That was always the wrong thing to optimize for. It’s just more obvious now.
You have to be patient. Async is inherently slower for any individual exchange. Your question might take two hours to get answered instead of two minutes. In exchange, you get more thoughtful answers and fewer interruptions. It’s a trade-off, and in my experience it’s a good one.
And you have to over-communicate context. Without hallway conversations filling in gaps, you need to be explicit about the why, the constraints, what you already tried, what you’re optimizing for. It feels like too much at first. It’s not.
Will it stick?
I want to believe this will produce lasting change, but I’m not totally sure. There’s a strong pull back toward the way things were. A lot of managers are more comfortable with meetings than with docs, and a lot of orgs are going to snap back to their old habits the minute offices reopen.
The async-first model isn’t new – GitLab, Automattic, and other distributed companies have been doing it for years. What’s new is the whole industry being forced to try it. The teams that lean into this instead of fighting it are going to discover that async-first doesn’t just enable remote work. It makes all work better. Fewer meetings, better documentation, more focused time, decisions that have reasoning attached and records you can find.
The pandemic is temporary. I hope the lessons aren’t.